Petrarch needed to be purged. There was widespread agreement on this opinion during the Counter-Reformation. One famous anonymous letter submitted to the Congregation of the Index during the pontificate of Pope Gregory XIII (1572–1585) described Petrarch as dux et magister spurcarum libidinum—“guide and teacher of filthy lust.” Concern was not limited to the censors. The religious poet Gabriele Fiamma (c. 1533–1585) announced in the prefatory letter to his influential Rime spirituali (1570) his plan to cleanse poetry of its impurities, stating that “although [Petrarch’s] words are not shameful, they are however amorous, and like tinder to a fire,” one that might engulf young readers in flame. But curing the fever and fire of Petrarchism turned out not to be so simple. Such poetry was simply too popular. And so carnal lyric appetites were not eradicated in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries so much as redirected: they were channeled into religious verse. The role of the lyric beloved came increasingly to be filled not by Laura lookalikes, but by Christ, Mary, and the saints. The present chapter explores how Petrarchism—and the fluid perception of gendering for both poet and beloved—evolved as amorous and spiritual lyric melded.

What would Petrarch's love poetry have looked like had the love been requited? It is hard to know, because his poetry for Laura is so essentially about passions unfulfilled. However, Petrarch did have the opportunity, at least, to write of love realized. As Gordon Braden has noted, though the poet was never married, he had two children for whom he apparently felt a deep fondness; yet the woman or women who gave birth to these children cannot be found in his verse. Braden has voiced frustration at Petrarch's refusal to record experiences of domestic affection: “It is hard for modern readers not to miss that poetry and to feel that its lack measures the oppressive narrowness of Petrarchan lyricism.”

Yet a number of Petrarch's followers did step off this “narrow” path. Francesca Turina, featured in Chapter 2 for her friendship with Capoleone Ghelfucci, published a great quantity of verses for her husband in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Among these, in her 1628 collection, was a trio of sonnets about her first pregnancy and the miscarriage that ended it. She describes great grief at the event, narrating how her mourning was both entwined with, and eased by, the love she shared with her husband.

In the twenty-first century, it is increasingly common to understand gender and sexuality as fluid. Ours is not, however, the first generation in history to arrive at this insight. The popular Renaissance mythography by Vincenzo Cartari (c. 1531–after 1571), Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi (Images of the Gods of the Ancients, 1556), is an example of the extent to which early modern readers felt at ease in the unsettled expanse between traditional markers of gender. In his catalogue of the iconographic tradition of Venus, beside the helpful marginal marker Venere con la barba (Bearded Venus), Cartari describes how sometimes the ancients represented the goddess with facial hair, as in a sacred statue found on Cyprus “whose face and mien appeared to be that of a man, but who was dressed as a woman.” In the 1571 edition, a woodcut was added, which provided a double portrait of Venus, side by side in two guises: on the left, shrouded in traditional women's mourning garments for Adonis, her fallen lover; on the right, the bigendered, bearded Venus, with male face and feminine attire (fig. 0.1).

An early modern, gender-fluid portrayal of the goddess of love is a fitting opening for this book, which reveals how Italian men and women used Petrarchism as a vehicle with which to move fluidly between the poles of conventionally constructed masculinity and femininity. What is surprising is not so much that these poets worked in the space between prescriptive gender norms. The presence of the bearded Venus in a text as widely circulated as Cartari’s, without commentary or caveat, is evidence enough of comfort with that ambiguity. Rather, it is the willfulness with which they challenged traditional models, exploring radically alternative concepts of what it meant to be a man or woman in early modern Italy.

In the history of Western gender, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted the patriarchal attachment to hierarchical, binary thinking.

The last chapter closed with Pietro Bembo and Vittoria Colonna, progenitors of the Petrarchist movement. This chapter picks up with a poet born shortly after their deaths in 1547. Francesca Turina Bufalini (1553–1641) was a poet of domestic and spiritual verse active in the late Cinquecento and early Seicento. In recent years, Turina has begun to garner scholarly attention, especially for her autobiographical verse, much of which describes her affective bonds for her parents, husband, children, and grandchildren. Another important personal relationship serves to frame the current chapter: Turina's friendship with the writer Capoleone Ghelfucci (1541–1600). Compatriots of Umbria and taken by a common religious fervor, Turina and Ghelfucci developed an abiding creative and spiritual bond. The two traded letters and poems. They encouraged and commented on each other's writing, especially her romance, “Il Florio,” and his religious epic, the Rosario della Madonna (1600). Around the end of the sixteenth century, Ghelfucci compiled for Turina an amorous canzoniere, a manuscript that is now preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale of Arezzo.

One sonnet from this manuscript collection is a particularly suggestive text with which to think through the poets’ relationship, and by extension, the nature of the broader dialogue between male and female poets of this generation in Italy—how the conversation around gender, spoken in the language of Petrarchism, continued to evolve from where we left off in the previous chapter.

The Heroides of Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) is a collection of fifteen Latin verse epistles, written from the perspective of famous heroines of epic and myth. The titular heroines, commonly referred to as “abandoned women,” write to absent male lovers; the first letter in the collection, from Penelope to Ulysses, is quoted in the epigraph above. Other classical writers had composed ventriloquized literature before this, but Ovid's Heroides is unique on at least two counts: first, the letters are poetry rather than prose; and second, they are both very personal and very intimate. As Laurel Fulkerson writes, “the poems focus on such a small portion of human experience.” Classical scholars have written of the considerable rhetorical and selffashioning agency of Ovid's heroines, who seem to take on a life of their own.

Hugely popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Ovid's collection was published across Europe in the original Latin and in vernacular translations and was often accompanied by elaborate commentaries.

The Canzoniere that Petrarch left behind after his death in 1374 can appear manifestly unsocial. This is especially true when considered beside the great range of correspondence verse that littered the poetic landscape in the Italian Middle Ages. The last chapter mentioned the influence of medieval contrasti and tenzoni fittizie, such as those found in the thirteenth-century manuscript Vaticano Latino 3793. One might also call to mind something like Dante's famous tenzone with Forese Donati, and the former's jabs about the latter's impotence; or Dante's circulation of a poem about dreaming of his lady in Love's arms, and the memorable reply from Dante da Maiano that he should wash his testicles in cold water. Beside such examples of poetic thrust and parry, Petrarch—so great a fan of reclusion that he authored an entire treatise on the virtues of the solitary life—seems to stand apart, the author of a volume of lyric about a man chasing the ghost of a girl through the woods solus.

And yet, despite first impressions and Petrarch's best, loneliest intentions, there is much that relates to the collective in his verse. The first line of the proemial sonnet famously posits an audience, addressing readers directly in the second person plural: “You who listen in scattered rhymes” (Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse).

This is a book about Petrarch (1304–1374); but this chapter begins with the figure of Cesare Borgia (1475–1507). The favorite son of Pope Alexander VI— who was perhaps the most infamous bishop of Rome in the long history of that post—Borgia was one of Italy's most lethal military mercenaries, tasked with commanding the papal armies in a bloody campaign through Central Italy. He was idolized by Machiavelli, who hailed him in The Prince as the model of unmerciful rulership. And, in 1503, he was also the dedicatee of a particularly fine edition of Petrarch's love poetry.

This edition of Petrarch's lyric was printed by Girolamo Soncino (fl. 1488–1533) in Fano, a town east of Florence, along the Adriatic coast in the Marches. Petrarch had titled his collection Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of vernacular things); this particular volume bore the name Opere volgari di Messer Francesco Petrarca (Vernacular Works of Sir Francesco Petrarch), combining the poet's lyric collection with the Trionfi (Triumphs), as was common in the period. The printing featured a splendid typeface, designed by Francesco Griffo, the same punchcutter who had invented the italic font for Aldus Manutius (c. 1450–151

I THINK you will allow me no inconsiderable share of credit for the cordial manner in which I have lauded the excellencies of the Scottish Barristers, when I tell you, that those whom I have particularly described to you, are each and all of them Whigs—most of them fervent, nay, bigotted Whigs, or, as Dr Parr would say, χυιγ-ωτατοι. Nor will it diminish the merits of my liberality, when I inform you, that the friend, under whose auspices my inspection of Edinburgh has been chiefly conducted, so far from regarding these eminent men with the same impartial eye of which I have made use, has well nigh persuaded himself into a thorough conviction, that their talents and attainments are most extravagantly over-rated in common opinion; and has, moreover, omitted no opportunity of detracting from them in private, when he may have heard me expatiate upon their praises. There are only two exceptions to this—Mr Cranstoun and Mr Jeffrey. The former he cannot help admiring and loving for the beautifully classical style of his eloquence, and, indeed, of all his attainments; but I think it forms no small ingredient both in his love and admiration that Mr Cranstoun happens to be sprung from one of the greatest of the old Border families, and so, it may be supposed, to have been nourished in infancy with the same milk of romantic and chivalrous tradition, of which he himself imbibed so largely then, and with the influences of which even now his whole character and conversation are saturated and overflowing; for I have already said enough to satisfy you, that few men can quote the words of the poet with more propriety than Mr Wastle:

In regard to Jeffrey, his mode of thinking may perhaps appear something still more peculiar. In the first place, indeed, the talents of this remarkable man are of such an order, that it is quite impossible a man of such talents as Mr Wastle should not admire them.